The incredible shrinking LLM, and still (almost) as powerful as the Brobdingnagians

Kudos to @zhansheng for the fast LLaMa implementation and @rtaori13, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, @lxuechen, @yanndubs for the incredible Alpaca dataset and training code 🤗

— Lewis Tunstall (@_lewtun) March 16, 2023

LLaMA = Large Language Model Meta AI:

As part of Meta’s commitment to open science, today we are publicly releasing LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI. Smaller, more performant models such as LLaMA enable others in the research community who don’t have access to large amounts of infrastructure to study these models, further democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field.

Training smaller foundation models like LLaMA is desirable in the large language model space because it requires far less computing power and resources to test new approaches, validate others’ work, and explore new use cases. Foundation models train on a large set of unlabeled data, which makes them ideal for fine-tuning for a variety of tasks. We are making LLaMA available at several sizes (7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B parameters) and also sharing a LLaMA model card that details how we built the model in keeping with our approach to Responsible AI practices.

Over the last year, large language models — natural language processing (NLP) systems with billions of parameters — have shown new capabilities to generate creative text, solve mathematical theorems, predict protein structures, answer reading comprehension questions, and more. They are one of the clearest cases of the substantial potential benefits AI can offer at scale to billions of people.

Even with all the recent advancements in large language models, full research access to them remains limited because of the resources that are required to train and run such large models. This restricted access has limited researchers’ ability to understand how and why these large language models work, hindering progress on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues, such as bias, toxicity, and the potential for generating misinformation.

Smaller models trained on more tokens — which are pieces of words — are easier to retrain and fine-tune for specific potential product use cases. We trained LLaMA 65B and LLaMA 33B on 1.4 trillion tokens. Our smallest model, LLaMA 7B, is trained on one trillion tokens.

There's more at the link.